How Pokrovsk lives and dies
Little in Pokrovsk reminds you of New Year's celebrations. Artillery fire replaced fireworks, houses burned from incoming shells, and streets were filled with burned-out cars. The only semblance of festivity came from the mandarins that social worker Oksana distributed to the lonely residents of Pokrovsk. Desperate, they tried to warm up in houses with shattered windows. In a city where the sound of war had already replaced carols.
Just 2 km away from where the Russians were, something resembling life still simmered in the city. But the battle for Pokrovsk, which would determine the future of southern Donetsk Oblast, had effectively begun.
Awaiting a truce
Oksana, a thin blonde woman with glasses, puts the trays of food that the World Central Kitchen volunteers have just delivered into her bag. They contain still hot buckwheat with sausage and Olivier salad. There are mandarins in the box. Here, in the local social service center, social workers who stay in the city and visit their clients are bustling. They share the lunches that will soon be distributed in Pokrovsk.
When the frontline was farther away from the city, the territorial center of the city council served 330 pensioners and people with disabilities, more than a hundred of them with limited mobility. Now, people leave every day, so the data has to be constantly updated, and the lack of communication makes it more difficult.
"As long as the last recipient of social services is here, we have to be here," says Varvara Kopylova, director of the center.
She wears a jacket and a hat inside the center. There is no heating in the city, so this is a common sight. Varvara was born and raised in Pokrovsk. It's hard for her to see how schools, kindergartens, and the institute are being destroyed.
"I understand that everything is needed for defense, but all the poplars that are 50 years old have been cut down, and my heart bleeds. Although we understand that if there is peace and everything is good, everything will be restored. If only people were alive and healthy, but all this is transient," says Varvara.
This idea that the Russians will not come to Pokrovsk because peace is coming is repeated like a mantra on the streets of the city.
"I’ve been told there will be a truce, there will be ceasefire and there will be negotiations. We hope that they will agree on something... We lived here so well," sighs 72-year-old Valentyna, standing in line at the entrance to the center. She is one of those pensioners who come to the center for their lunches.
"What else can I do? My pension is small, I'm alone, a widow. Maybe things will get even worse. I don't know," she says when asked if she will stay in Pokrovsk. This is how most of the locals explain their decision: they have nowhere to go and nothing to live on.
Meanwhile, Oksana is already hanging her bags on her bicycles–hers and Volodymyr's, who helps her deliver lunches–and is heading through the neighborhoods to visit her disabled customers. It is these two neighborhoods–Shakhtarskyi and Lazurnyi–that are closest to the Russians and seem to be the most battered.
Cut off from civilization
The inscription “Press” on my bulletproof vest attracts attention. Journalists are not always treated favorably in the frontline towns of Donetsk Oblast, but here, for the first time since the full-scale invasion, residents themselves came up to me and asked me to record their words and "pass them on to Kyiv."
They feel cut off. These days, mobile service, the last marker of civilization in Pokrovsk, has disappeared. It is weakly penetrating only in some parts of the city. Heating, water, and electricity disappeared even earlier. The Internet can only be caught in the post offices that are still open. The last Ukrposhta mail branch is scheduled to close on January 15.
One driver, passing me, started to back up to share his indignation at the poplar trees that had been cut down. The locals were proud of them and are having a hard time accepting this loss.
In the line for hot lunches, grandmothers asked me to tell Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Pokrovsk had become a "dead city."
"There is nothing: cold and hunger. There is no place to warm up, no place to heat food. If only there were heating stations somewhere," the old ladies say, but ask not to give their names because they do not know what kind of "government" will be in place.
At the Nova Poshta office, a woman approached me and asked if we had come to report on the real situation in the city.
"If there is any opportunity to convey that we are the same people, we just want to live... We are not waiting for anyone, we just want to be in our city," she said through tears, introducing herself as Nadiya Kovalchuk.
She is outraged that, in her opinion, the Pokrovsk Civil-Military Administration did not prepare the city for defense and began to install "dragon's teeth" and other defensive fortifications too late, and does not properly help the residents who remain in the city.
"I hope that everything will be fine thanks to our guys. Thank you for listening, because it's a shame, because the authorities only come to talk on camera, but no one is interested in what people are doing and how they are doing," the woman complains.
Russians one plantation away
"There's Shevchenko, the plantation, and this field," Ivan, a soldier with the 93rd Brigade, explains.
It was there, in the village of Shevchenko, that the Russians managed to break through the Ukrainian defense in November and advance close to the city. That is, they are one plantation away from these streets of Pokrovsk.
Ivan, a 22-year-old platoon commander, enters the yard of a burning house. The Russians smashed it in the morning, but it's evening and it's still smoldering. The owners left earlier.
"This is a complete clusterf*ck. ‘The liberators’. But some are waiting. They are waiting," the soldier says, lighting a cigarette.
These are the outer streets of Pokrovsk's detached housing neighborhood. Some of the houses have already been smashed, while others are being marked with signs saying "People live here".
Drones are constantly flying overhead. The Russians publish videos of their fiber-optic UAVs flying deep into the city.
In the background, you can hear artillery impacts. It is not from Pokrovsk itself, but from the village of Pishchane, where the fighting is taking place, says Ivan. From there, the Russians are trying to get to one of the approaches to the city, which runs through Mezhova in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and from there to the key Pavlohrad-Donetsk highway. This will cut off key logistics routes.
"They're not taking the city; they're bypassing it. Maybe they want to encircle it so that someone surrenders later," Ivan speculates.
But for now, the soldier believes they can hold out: "Everything is in our hands; there are plenty of possibilities."
It's four degrees in the apartment
A brightly colored playground is surrounded by gray, shattered high-rise buildings.
"People live where the windows are boarded up," Oksana points to a broken-down nine-story building in the Lazurnyi neighborhood that looks completely uninhabitable.
The Pokrovsk residents continue to live in the most destroyed neighborhoods of the city, but at the same time they are also arranging basements. Iron chimneys are sticking out of the lower floors of the buildings as locals are installing stoves. According to local authorities, over 7,000 residents remain in Pokrovsk.
Oksana says that the hit was about a month ago and destroyed all the buildings in the yard with a blast wave. A social worker enters one of these buildings to deliver hot lunches.
The door is opened by 69-year-old Valentyna Pavlivna, who comes out leaning on a crutch. She is wearing a warm brown jacket, blue mittens on her hands, and a yellow knitted headband.
"We're holding on," she answers the question "How are you?" with a laugh, though tired.
She was at home when the neighboring building was hit. She recalls hearing several explosions.
"It's cold; the apartment is four degrees, but it's bearable under the blankets. Right now, I take off my jacket when I get under the blanket, but maybe soon I won't bother taking it off. We have to cope somehow," the woman says. "I think it's all going to be here for a while, but I hope we stay alive. If it's not meant to be, then it's not meant to be."
Oksana hands her trays of food, pulls mandarins from her pocket, and hugs her goodbye. Valentyna starts to cry.
"Shh, maybe I'll be gone for a month, and then I'll come back," Oksana reassures her. She will be leaving the city now that the situation has become so complicated. "Will you be okay without me?"
"It will be very hard without you," Valentyna responds.
Through her tears, she watches as Oksana descends the stairs.
Catching the war in Pokrovsk
Oksana's red jacket contrasts with the battered high-rise buildings she passes as she pushes her bicycle and bags. Oksana strongly disagrees that most locals are waiting for the Russians to come.
She says they hope that Pokrovsk will remain Ukrainian. She herself has lived here all her life, but at the request of her children, she is leaving.
On her way to the next customer, Oksana passes by closed shops and cafes. Some of them still have generators running, a sign of life. There is a market in town.
"The city used to thrive. It's hard to see it all," she concludes.
A car with a white flag on the mirror drives past us. This is how the few remaining drivers in the city indicate that they are civilians so that Russian drones won't target them. But it seems this doesn't always work. Burnt-out cars that clearly did not belong to the military line the streets.
"Who could have thought there would be a war?" Oksana muses. "No one thought it would happen. My mother lived through the war. She says she never thought her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would experience it too. She says, 'Never in my life could I have imagined this.'"